PIA08262: The Ring Sculptor

Prometheus zooms across the Cassini spacecraft’s field of view, attended
by faint streamers and deep gores in the F ring. This movie sequence of
five images shows the F ring shepherd moon shaping the ring’s inner edge.

Note that the faint ringlet coincident with the orbit of Prometheus (102
kilometers, or 63 miles across) decreases sharply in brightness behind the
moon in its path. The normally twisted-looking F ring core is overexposed
in the images, causing its appearance to be more uniform than it usually
is.

The images were taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft
narrow-angle camera on Aug. 11, 2006 at a distance of approximately 2.2
million kilometers (1.4 million miles) from Saturn and at a
Sun-Saturn-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 162 degrees. Image scale is 13
kilometers (8 miles) per pixel.

The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European
Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory,
a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages
the mission for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, Washington, D.C. The
Cassini orbiter and its two onboard cameras were designed, developed and
assembled at JPL. The imaging operations center is based at the Space
Science Institute in Boulder, Colo.